11 posts from May 2008

May 29, 2008

(I've written the "Business Europe" column for today's Wall Street Journal Europe. The article is on the WSJ website and below. I've added the first picture to this post).

In a big hangar at a former military airfield near Zurich in mid-May, Bertrand Piccard stepped into a prototype airplane cockpit (picture) and began "flying." And kept on going. For 25 hours straight.

The test, followed a day later by another 25-hour dry run with pilot André Borschberg, went well. It was the first real-scale flight simulation for Solar Impulse, an unconventional aircraft designed to circumnavigate the Earth powered uniquely by solar energy, without producing any polluting emissions. Mr. Piccard's team is planning the first real takeoffs in mid-2009, and then a few months later a 36-hour trip aimed at assessing the feasibility of manned nighttime flights – when the energy source, the sun, is "off."

If everything goes according to plan, a five-leg, monthlong tour of the world will follow at some point in 2011 or 2012, with Messrs. Piccard and Borschberg each flying alternating stretches of five days and five nights between landings. "We're not in it just for the adventure," Mr. Piccard told me. The team wants to use this attention-grabbing challenge to inflect energy and climate policies and "to become a testing ground for the development and exploitation of renewable energies and clean technologies" – with an eye also to their future commercial potential.

Crazy? Sun-powered prototype planes have been around for a while. But this would be the first with a man on board; the first to stay aloft day and night; and the first to take off with its own power, after sitting on the runway until the sunrays, and only the sunrays, have charged up its batteries.

In a world dependent upon fossil fuels, the Solar Impulse project is certainly a provocation. But it comes with credentials. It's the brainchild of Mr. Piccard, a 50-year-old Swiss aeronaut and scientist. His legendary grandfather Auguste in 1931 became the first man to reach the stratosphere in a balloon. In 1960 his father, Jacques, together with U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh, was the first to reach the deepest trenches of the oceans, the Mariana's, in a bathyscaphe.

Unable to beat them up or down, Bertrand went horizontal. In 1999, alongside Brian Jones of Britain, he completed the first nonstop, round-the-world flight in a hot-air balloon. The duo prevailed over a number of competitors, including Richard Branson.

Mr. Piccard and his team have already lined up €40 million ($63 million) in sponsorship money from Deutsche Bank, Belgian chemical group Solvay, and Swiss watchmaker (and NASA supplier) Omega. The project also has technological and scientific cooperations with French high-tech firms Dassault and Altran, the European Space Agency, and the Swiss Institute of Technology, among others. The project has even received the official patronage of the European Commission, which sees in it "an example of what industry and energy policy makers should be doing to foster energy efficiency and clean mobility."

The first Solar Impulse aircraft, dubbed HB-SIA, is currently under development (picture left: a virtual rendering of what the plane will look like). It will have the weight of a car (a bit less than 2 tons) but the wingspan of an Airbus 320 (about 60 meters; a subsequent version will be 20 meters wider). The wings will be covered with solar cells. Stacks of batteries will store the energy accumulated during daylight to power the four engines at night.

After sunset, the plane will also glide to preserve energy, gradually dropping to 2,000 meters altitude from the cruising level of 8,500, before climbing again. In this scheme, altitude will become a virtual form of energy: The higher they fly during daytime, the longer they will be able to glide during the night. Dawn will be a critical moment: Have they stored enough energy from the day before, and have they been able to glide long enough so that the plane can "encounter" the sun and start recharging the batteries?

The project presents a variety of extreme design and technology challenges, and it may still fly into turbulence. To succeed, Mr. Piccard's team will have to produce or benefit from others' advances in materials and composite structures, which need to be solid and lightweight. They'll also need ultraefficient solar energy capture (cells) and storage (batteries) that don't exist today, along with more-developed aerodynamics and propulsion. "The key is really energy efficiency," explains Mr. Borschberg. "We need to find ways to extract maximal power from minimal energy, and to fly using as little of it as possible."

They will also have to push the boundaries in meteorology, routing and human physiology monitoring. The pilot will be up there alone for days and nights in a row, wearing a special shirt filled with sensors and even a vibrating system that can be remotely activated to wake him up. He will also have to manage his sleep, food intake and other physical needs in a cockpit built to be narrow and spartan, to help keep the airplane light.

Could this technology one day be used on all airplanes? Even Bertrand Piccard doesn't envision solar planes replacing today's aircraft anytime soon. But the Solar Impulse project aims to become a catalyst for the development of solar and other technologies that could lead to future applications in air travel and in areas other than aviation.

A visit to another, sealed-off part of the hangar reveals a skunkworks where cockpit and wings are being assembled, aerodynamics tested, engines miniaturized, software developed, special ultralight and resistant foams shaped into craft parts. Here lies part of the sponsor's interest in supporting the project: The Solvay engineers, for instance, are working on the foams, intended to protect batteries and engines from big temperature differences – and promise significant future commercial applications, should Solar Impulse succeed.

"We want to show people that renewable energy is not a step backwards but a jump into the future," Mr. Piccard told me. "If we can go around the world in a solar aircraft, that means that we can do incredible things with renewables."

May 28, 2008

When consumers turn into active stakeholders in the economy, they become integral part of the value creation process. A new dimension is thus opened: the “value chain 2.0“.

This dimension is, in some sense, a continuation of the value chain concept established by Michael Porter in 1985. However, here the focus is on a participative economy.

Download:

This essay on "The Value Chain 2.0" can be downloaded in PDF in English (here) and French (here)

Value chain 2.0 takes into account the active consumer in the production of value, across every level of a company’s activities. Henceforth, we call the active consumer the “ConsumActor “ to indicate this reality.

The ConsumActor acts along two dimensions, as a:

creator of context (action)

creator of content (knowledge)

We recognize how deeply this shift towards “customer empowerment” is affecting the economy, especially in Internet-based industries.

The classic linear representation of the value chain needs therefore some fundamental rethinking. How can the old value chain integrate the non-linear, complex and networked realities of the participative economy?

The diagram of the value chain 2.0 below proposes an adaptation of the old value chain for the direct economy:

Explanation :

1. Participative Activities vs. Primary Activities

The basic activities of the company must henceforth integrate the activities of the ConsumActor.

1.1. Open Inbound Logistics vs. Inbound LogisticsThe supply (reception, stock and distribution of raw materials) can be entrusted in certain cases to the ConsumActor (e.g. The customer arrives with his own T-shirts for personalization).

The support environment does not belong any longer to the company itself, but to the whole ecosystem in which the company is immersed in.

2.1. Mutistakeholders Infrastructure vs. Firm InfrastructureThe internal infrastructures of a company connect directly to the infrastructures of the other "stakeholders.” The result is a multi-stakeholder environment. (e.g. computer cloud).

2.2. Customer Network Management vs. HR management The management of human resource management is extended and now also includes the client’s network. (e.g. Facebook).

The model of the value chain 2.0 presented above takes into account the change of paradigms imposed by the active participation of ConsumActors in the economy.

When customers are no longer in a passive or self-service mode, but have become active -- i.e., operating in a do-it-yourself, co-design or co-creative mode -- the traditional value chain model is no longer effective.

We have thus today two complementary and distinct value chains: the traditional value chain with a passive customer, and the version 2.0 with an active customer, the CustomActor. The two models in tandem allow us to analyze the activities of the contemporary companies.

Indeed the value chain 2.0 is valid only for companies that have opened up their value chains to integrate their customers.

Yet it is a phenomenon which we notice every day.

(Xavier Comtesse is a mathematician, author of several books on innovation, and the Geneva-based Director of Avenir Suisse, a think-tank. Jeffrey Huang is a Professor and the Director of the Media and Design Laboratory at the Swiss Institute of Technology EPFL in Lausanne. They are both part of the Geneva-based braintrust ThinkStudio, where this essay originated.)

May 27, 2008

The NYT has a great story about Jill Taylor, who spoke at TED in March. "The result (of the speech) was electric. After her 18-minute address was posted as a video on TED’s site, she become a mini-celebrity .. chosen as one of Time magazine’s 100" etc

US-focused but true for everyone, by JH Kunstler (author of "World Made by Hand" about the post-oil future). What he advocates will never happen in the US, but shows how far off the mark the US (and the world) are about the complexities of oil dependence.

May 26, 2008

Interesting data about the "size" of the average webpage, from WebsiteOptimization: the size (total of all the elements in a page) has more than tripled since 2003, growing from 93.7Kb to over 312Kb (plus 233%).

During the same five-year period, the number of objects in the average
web page (texts, images, ads, audio, video, applets, etc) nearly doubled from 25.7 to 49.9 objects per page on average, with top sites including generally more objects. As broadband becomes more widespread, web designers have created more elaborate designs, and web2.0 technologies such as Ajax certainly contribute to the increase in the number of objects per page. Longer term
statistics show that since 1995 the size of the average web page has
increased by 22 times, and the number of objects per page has grown by
21.7 times.

Other data:

The average download time of a chosen set of pages has decreased from 2.8 to 2.33
seconds from Feb. 2006 to Feb. 2008: in other words, the increase in the average speed of broadband has more than kept
pace with the increase in the size and complexity of the average web
page.

A 2006 survey of over 21,500 non-framed web pages found that the average web page contained 474 words, 281
HTML tags, and 41 links, 10 of which pointed outside the domain.

The use of streaming media on the Web has increased by more than 100%
each year. From 2000 to 2005 the total volume of
streaming media files stored on the Web grew by more than 600%. More
than 87% of all streaming media is abandoned by users in the first 10
seconds, however.

About 10% of the most popular videos on YouTube account for nearly 80% of the views.

May 24, 2008

Nicoletta Iacobacci is the Head of Interactive TV/Eurovision at the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

Television, although originally a one-way (broadcast) medium, has been trying to engage its audience in a two-way experience for several decades.

A children's television programme called Winky Dink and You (CBS 1954) was the first attempt to drive the viewer from passive to active. Since then content providers, despite numerous failures along the way, have been trying to develop programs which create and exploit possibilities to be engaged by and to interact with TV content.Nowadays the future of entertainment can’t be conceived without enhanced content and multiplatform distribution strategies, matching the media habits of the "Pokemon generation", seamless consumers of games, books, Internet, film and television. The web is the platform which "glues" and allows this multi/enhanced/two-way/mobile entertainment experience. TV has lost its predominant role, and it is now mandatory for broadcasters to embed various forms of interactive technology in their programs and to focus on crossmedia content and transmedia strategies. As Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT and a foremost authority on today’s media environment says: "Media convergence makes the flow of content across multiple media inevitable".

How do crossmedia (Xmedia) and transmedia differ? Both are about content in a multiplatform distribution strategy. Both utilize the web as the main engaging space. Both relate to TV as one, maybe the most important, but just one of the media used to tell the story.

Let's try a definition. In a crossmedia environment, content is repurposed, diversified and spread across multiple devices to enhance, engage and reach as many users/viewers as possible. It is common to call crossmedia "content 360". It is generally the same program re-edited for different screens, fragmented content disseminated on different platforms, possibly incorporating extra content and channels to extend the viewers' experience. Brand here plays a key role and needs to be always identifiable. A typical form of crossmedia is when the plot of the story ends with a call-to-action, and drives the audience across different media. A good example is the BBC's Spooks, where, at the end of the TV episode, a cheerful announcement gives directions to a website.

In transmedia storytelling, content becomes invasive and permeates fully the audience's lifestyle. Stephen Erin Dinehart, who coined the term transmedia and created the VUP (viewer/user/player) relates this model to Richard Wagner and his concept of "total artwork" ("Gesamtkunstwerk") where the spectator becomes actor/player. A transmedia project develops storytelling across multiple forms of media in order to have different "entry points" in the story; entry-points with a unique and independent lifespan but with a definite role in the big narrative scheme.

More concretely, from the originator's perspective, transmedia is content embedded with marketing strategies, where content is treated as “goods” to be franchised. Each franchise should have the goal of expanding the audience experience and drive for more consumption in the overall scheme.

Both crossmedia and transmedia are obviously multimedia approaches, using largely of any available channel, tool and media to tell a story. The difference between the two is to ascribe to a consequent evolution in public demand. Content spread across various media (crossmedia) is no longer satisfying enough, viewers wants more, they are becoming VUPs and in viewing/using/playing want to participate, and to a certain extent create, the story themselves.

The most self-explanatory example of multi/Xmedia/transmedia production is a recent participatory drama by Swedish public television SVT, Marika (site - trailer in English) which won the 2008 iEmmy Awards. Marika included a TV drama series, in-studio debates, online virtual environments, events across Sweden, blogs (picture), chats, fabricated documents and props, forums and mobile games -- and drew the public, and the other mainstream media, into the story. Following the iEmmy Awards win, Marika is creating some turmoil among public broadcasters, but it is also pushing content creators to start daring on innovative productions.

May 14, 2008

Elmar Mock believes that "most people talk of innovation but what they actually do, is renovation". He should know: in 1980 Mock, together with fellow engineer Jacques Müller, co-invented the Swatch, the plastic watch that started the rescue -- and led to the current triumph -- of the then-depressed Swiss watchmaking industry, which was suffering in particular from the competition of Japanese digital watch manufacturers such as Seiko.

Mock and Müller sketched out the lightweight, iconic, fashionable and colored plastic watch in May 1980. Codename of the first prototypes: "Delirium Vulgare". The first collection of 12 Swatch models went on sale in Zurich in 1983. The key engineering innovation of the Swatch was to use an integrated production technique that reduced the number of parts by half, to about 50; but the key design and marketing innovation was to put on the market a plastic watch that, at the beginning, met with legions of skeptics. But which went on to sell hundreds of millions of pieces -- the 333-million mark was past in 2006.

Mock (picture left) left Swatch in 1986 and to launch his own innovation firm, Creaholic, in Biel/Bienne, a city along the language divide between the German and the French parts of Switzerland, which someone dubbed "the Swiss Liverpool" for the industrial turmoil of the 1980s and the creative and economic renewal of the last 15 years. Mock will also be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Forum des 100 conference in Lausanne, which I've been producing.

I visited with Mock the other day at Creaholic's headquarter, nested in a former soap factory in the center of town: high ceilings, a suspended meeting room reachable through a short glass bridge, and plenty of room for the 30-something employees and partners. Creaholic has worked and works on a whole range of products, from hearing aids to ski gear, from packaging to flavors, from software to micromechanical devices. Their creative model is, says Mock, inspired by nature: ideas travel from a "gas phase", that of high-energy creativity, fantasy and dreams (and chaos), to a "liquid phase", where they start to coalesce and take a tangible form (here is where design comes into play, where thinking about usage and aesthetics are at work), to a "solid phase" where the value of the idea can be truly measured, and where the practical aspects of the development are dealt with (materials, production, industrialization).

The problem of innovation, says Mock, is in the love-hate relationship between the "gas" and the "solid" phases: it is in turning an intuition or a dream into an actual product that can "bring a timely business advantage" -- because competitive advantages, so thinks Creaholic, are always limited in time, and only constant innovation can keep you ahead.

Mock told me about some of the projects Creaholic has been working on, and one in particular, which is now a spinoff, caught my attention: WoodWelding. The starting point was some research into using thermoplastic elements (resins) to weld, reinforce or anchor wood. Said in very simple terms (I'm probably oversimplifying) WoodWelding's technology uses nails or seals or pegs made of synthetic resins as fixations. Put a resin nail into wood, for example and pass ultrasonic energy through it: the resin will start to liquefy and penetrate into the porous material. It then cools rapidly, resulting -- in a few seconds -- in a stable and durable bond. Look at the bottom item in the picture: the resin nail has basically "melted" into the wood, becoming "part" of it. This is applicable to most porous materials, such as chipboard, concrete, or paper.

The technology however had a slow start, and for what I know only one company has licensed the technology for things like cabinet and window assembly. However, the part that I found most interesting is that several companies have licensed it for medical applications. Because -- and this was nowhere in the inventor's initial thinking -- bones are also a very porous material, and the WoodWelding technology has turned out to be ideal for cranio-maxillofacial usage (welding a broken skull, for instance) or for orthopaedics.

This is a very telling example of how innovations often find their best/ideal applications outside their original field of reference -- and spotting this lateral opportunities (finding ideas and solutions outside your field, etc) is a key way to gain a competitive edge.

The Solar Impulse team (the Swiss team building an aircraft powered solely by solar, I've already blogged about it) started today a full-scale simulation, with the two pilots each making a 25-hour non-stop "virtual flight".

May 10, 2008

Malcom Gladwell speculates (in a long New Yorker piece focusing on Nathan Myhrvold) on the nature of ideas and whether it takes genius to have them. "The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time."

John Gapper at the FT has a couple of "lingering doubts" about Gladwell's article, including criticism of Myhrvold's approach (patent troll): "it an idea does not actually work, then I would suggest that it does not count as an invention".

Michele Bowman lists 5 trends in "mobile activism": "From fish farmers in India to mobile financing in Africa, the ability of the mobile phone to effect social change is one of the most exciting and important stories being written today" (From FringeHog)

Evgeny Morozov: "Somebody “hacked” a deer in Pennsylvania, attached a GPS, a cellphone with SMS, and used the SMS-to email-to-blog system to regularly post the location of the deer to a blog, then to a spreadsheet, to Google Maps and Google Earth"...

Insight from Tim Mansfield: "The primary goal of a social network is to connect people and help them maintain weak ties, not to simplify communication or help them stay in touch". For that we have email and IM.

May 02, 2008

OK folks, wherever you are, get your calendar out and write down this under Saturday, May 10th: Pangea Day.

I just got the most recent progress report from the team organizing it, and it will be a remarkable event. You don't want to miss it. You don't want your family and friends and neighbors and colleagues to miss it.

It will be a first-of-its-kind: a global campfire, an event bringing the world together and celebrating our common humanity through film. Broadcast simultaneously and live in over 100 countries, available as a full-screen webstream everywhere there is a broadband Internet connection, and visible on cell phones.

Pangea Day will feature four hours of films and videos, live music, short inspiring speeches, and live audiences from satellite-connected locations in Cairo (the Pyramids), Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. If you will be in one of these cities, you can apply for free tickets; if not, you can make plans to attend any of the over 1300 other screenings -- in homes, movie theatres and larger venues -- that have already been listed on the Pangea Day site, a list that keeps growing. Or even better, you can host your own Pangea Day event for your friends: all you will need is a large TV screen, and the right channel access or a good Internet connection.

OK, if you've penciled the date in your calendar, let's now make a step back: what is this about? Pangea Day was born out of filmmaker Jehane Noujaim's speech at the TED conference in 2006. Two years earlier, Jehane had directed "Control Room", the controversial documentary following events at Al Jazeera at the beginning of the Irak war. "I don't know if a film can change the world", she said at TED, "but I believe it has the
ability to take you across borders, into another world, and maybe that
has the ability to transform" (watch her speech here, or read my blog summary). And if films cannot change the world, the people watching them certainly can. So she wished for "a day when the world comes together through film", called Pangea, from the time when all the continents were still together in one single landmass.

The idea has grown into a giant global project, with the support of TED; of TED patrons Shawn and Brooke Byers and countless other TEDsters; of personalities such as JJ Abrams ("Lost") and Forest Whitaker ("The Last King Of Scotland"), Judy McGrath (CEO of MTV), architect Richard Rogers and singer Paul Simon, among many others that joined the incredible advisory board; of more personalities such as Queen Noor of Jordan and CNN star reporter Christiane Amanpour (both will talk), Brazilian singer Gilberto Gil and Iranian rock phenomenon Hypernova (both will sing live); of main sponsor Nokia and of partners MSN, Akamai, AvenueA/Razorfish and others; of dozens of broadcasters (including CurrentTV in the US, StarTV all over China/India/Asia, MGM Networks in Latin America, Sky in the UK, Canal+/Planete in France, several in the Middle East, in Indonesia, in Mexico and many more -- covering over 100 countries); and of thousands of people around the world who have signed up to host a screening, to promote Pangea, or have submitted their own videos for consideration.

Because -- and here we come to what will happen during the four hours -- part of the content of Pangea Day has been produced by people like you and me, over 2500 of them from over 100 countries, who have uploaded their videos to the Pangea site. 20+ have been selected to be shown during the broadcast, ranging in length from 2 to 15 minutes. They are, by turns, funny, touching, dramatic and inspiring, and they all tell powerful stories, often without using words, of what it is to be human.

Yes, I know some among you are already shaking their head: ah, another warm and idealistic peace fest. But -- aside from the fact that, well, when exactly did idealism become a bad thing? -- here is why I believe Pangea Day will be worth your time and effort: because the world needs, urgently needs, a big infusion of "us", a spark that can start a truly global conversation, a growing sense that there is something we all share, and it's the only thing that matters: our humanity.

I'm not -- none of us in the TED and Pangea teams is -- under the illusion that Pangea Day will start an outbreak of global peace. But telling stories through film -- a universal language that often doesn't need words to pass on a message -- is especially powerful. Moreover, during Pangea Day you won't just be watching videos (and hearing speakers and listening to great music): you will also be watching the world watching, seeing how the other audiences at the other end of the planet will act and react. As TED curator Chris Anderson
wrote recently in an e-mail, "Some use the language of promoting global
citizenship, or reducing cross-cultural suspicion, or expanding our
circle of empathy, or eliminating the "us/them" mode of thinking. These
goals are all linked, and any progress towards them is a big deal".

The event -- "hosted" in English but realized in seven languages -- will take place 11am-3pm on the US West Coast, 2-6pm on the US East Coast, 7-11pm in the UK, 8pm-midnight in Europe and much of Africa, 9pm-1am in the Mideast, 11:30pm-3am in India, etc.

Now, if I still haven't convinced you that Pangea Day will be worth your time, maybe some of this will. This is the Pangea trailer:

The next one is a viral Pangea short video that debuted at TED this year, an invitation to see things differently, to consider also the other's point of view, based on the images of the famous scene of the unarmed young man carrying shopping bags who stood in front of
the tanks on Tienanmen Square, on 5 June 1989, blocking them. The young
man has remained anonymous. So did the soldier driving the tank:

There are also the US singing for Mexico, Australia singing for Lebanon, Japan singing for Turkey, UK singing for Argentina. There is plenty more: a Facebook group, communities on MySpace and Ovi, t-shirts and stickers, information on how to host a screening and how to watch online. On May 10, the YouTube homepage will be turned into a PangeaDay hub. And just to give you a sense of who else will be watching and experiencing Pangea with you around the world, here a few lines from the most recent status report I got from the fabulous Pangea team, led by Delia Cohen: hosts in Bogotà, Colombia, expect 25'000 people in an outdoor plaza; Pangea Day will be featured on opening night of the Stuttgart Night Lectures in Germany; The Buffalo International Film Festival will host Pangea Day in the historic Riviera Theatre there; There will be a gathering on an "open grass field" in Woodstock, NY (yes, that Woodstock); Tawandang German Brewery in Bangkok will host a screening for 500; Teachers and students in San Salvador, El Salvador, will gather to watch. Ah, and Karin in San Francisco will be hosting an event on her rooftop terrace and serving Pangea cakes. Karin who? Well, you will need to find out by yourselves.

Nor will Pangea end with the end of the broadcast: it will be followed by community-building activities around the world, local events, more videos and films, open online forums, a Pangea documentary, and more.

Where will I be on May 10? I will be acting as the TED "ambassador" at the London event. So if you plan to be there, do come up and say hello and let's watch some great videos together.